Picture Perfect and Not So Perfect

This mornign was picture perfect. I just wanted to stay! When I left my hostel this morning to meet my "van group" the above is what I saw. What a day to leave the lake. The weather was beautiful! The skies were mostly clear. I couldn't just stay because I had to catch my ride back to Lijiang.

I found the group I was riding with having breakfast at their hostel. I joined them for a Chinese bun, boiled egg but not like our boiled eggs, and rice soup. Thank God for the food training I've received in Korea. A few years ago I couldn't have enjoyed this breakfast. I had a hard time getting transportation from my own hostel because of my non-existent Chinese and their non-existent English. Lugu Lake was by far the hardest place for me to function without Chinese. So when the transportation thing was going bad I found the Chinese couple I rode up with. They have been living in Michigan for 20 years and are fluent in both languages. They were so kind to help and were fun to be around today. I'm so grateful for the people along the way who have helped!

The not so perfect part of my day was the the LONG drive. The drive was even longer today that Thursday. Hint 1: the back seat is the worst seat in a van on massage inducing roads! My behind must be bruised! Hint 2: Any seat is a bad seat with landslid-en roads.

The road back to Lijiang today had even more fallen rocks than on the trip to Lugu Lake. The rain must have caused it. Today we had to wait an hour for a road to be cleared. The picture above shows the woman waiting to sell us snack. The landslide proved to be a great economic opportunity!

The road had been impassable at the beginning of the week. When we passed by on Thursday a work crew had cleared some--enough for vehicles to pass by. In order to get the job done a road crew was stopping all traffic at regular intervals. After waiting in the heat and when we were all growing inpatient we finally were given the go ahead. We weren't through it yet! Not even 100 yards after we passed the work crew we had to stop again. There was no work crew to stop us. Only huge rocks! We saw a few small ones fall down to the road. Get me out of here! Luckily for us there was a tracker nearby to clear yet another part of the road and we were happily on our way again. Needless to say after 8 hours today on a rocky and bumpy road I was ready to get the heck out of the van. The scenery, however, made the crazy ride enjoyable.